The NATO Nuisance

Large and firmly implanted bureaucratic organizations are almost impossible
to kill, even when they have no reason to continue to exist, as NATO has not
since the Soviet Union, communism, and the Warsaw Pact all collapsed. There
is no equivalent to driving a stake into the heart of a bureaucracy, whose
impulse to live is inextinguishable. Hence the persisting efforts to force
the beast onto a new course where some good can come from its uncheckable energy.

Its existence also is a temptation to Washington to do foolish things. First
the decision was to expand NATO, despite the assurances that had been given
to Moscow by the George H.W. Bush administration. This perpetuated the organization’s
spirit, if not its function, as an institution hostile to Russia, which was
not the effect that intelligent people in the West should have wanted.

However, it actually did not displease many in the Baltic states and Central
and Eastern Europe who had spent the years since the beginning of World War
II under brutal Russian repression and were not in a forgiving mood. Yet forgiveness
 as an act of will and intelligence, not a sentiment  is essential to a
future that will be different. Thus Poland’s traumatic but essential consignment
of the Katyn murders to the past, now officially accomplished.

The Poles and the Baltic states had the most to forgive. NATO membership for
them was a sign of their security. That proved reassuring. Nonetheless there
survived in some circles in the United States of a will not only to see communism
ended but Russia crushed. The George W. Bush administration had no liking for
the new Russia, and the bullying of Russia to which Bush and Vice President
Dick Cheney were given was gratuitous and dangerous to all concerned. (Ask
Mikhail Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, who took assurances of eventual
NATO membership and American support too seriously.)

It was one thing to bring the Warsaw Pact states into NATO. It was something
else to try to dismember what had been Czarist Russia by bringing Ukraine and
Georgia into NATO  both efforts that failed.

The missile system that was to be installed in Poland and Czechoslovakia was
deliberate provocation  a system to protect the United States and Western
Europe from superpower Iran! The Russians interpreted it as plausibly part
of a nuclear first-strike system.

Thus NATO first was kept as an implicitly anti-Russian alliance.

But its long accumulation of weapons and systems and staffs were as a practical
matter being wasted. So it was decided that NATO had to accompany the United
States in its new "long war." The slogan was: "Out of area or
out of business!"

NATO was commandeered for Afghanistan, and its more vulnerable ex-Warsaw Pact
members were urged to take out extra security insurance with the United States
by sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, pointless as this proved to be.
Britain led the way, since it invented this form of insurance policy in 1945,
after exhausting itself by winning the Battle of Britain and the Battle of
El Alemain, thereby preventing World War II from being lost in 1942.

In Brussels, however, there is sign of new thought. The secretary general
of NATO, Anders Rasmussen, at a NATO dinner last week informally brought up
the possibility of recasting the missile defense program in collaboration with
Russia  a controversial notion that has the advantage of testing the strength
of Washington’s claim that America and Western Europe are endangered by Iran
and by nuclear terrorists by offering Russia a chance to buy into defense against
it, at the same time removing from the missile system the perceived threat
to Russia.

Think of the money that could be saved by abandoning the anti-missile system!
There also are a substantial number of expensive American tactical nuclear
weapons stored at West European airbases that the governments of five NATO
states would like removed. Now that no one expects a Russian nuclear blitzkrieg
attack on Europe, they serve no purpose. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
said the U.S. would never unilaterally remove its nuclear weapons from Europe
so long as Russia has nuclear weapons in Europe.

Like it or not, all of Russia west of the Ural Mountains, where Europe traditionally
has been held to stop and Asia begin, is permanently in Europe. One must suppose
that the secretary of state was addressing a message to European allies that
American weapons will be on their soil until total nuclear disarmament prevails
in Russia, which seems an unlikely prospect so long as total nuclear disarmament
does not prevail in the United States.

This is a childish and rather unpleasant position, since Germany, Norway,
the Netherlands, Belgium (so long as it survives its recurrent suicidal impulses),
and Luxembourg are serious and sovereign, rather than subordinate, nations,
and the United States, if it wishes itself to be taken seriously, would do
well to treat them as such.